New Particle Throws Monkeywrench in Particle Physics

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The hits just keep on coming from Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. So far this month, the lab has announced the discovery of a rare single top quark, and then narrowed the gap — twice, actually — for the mass of the elusive Higgs Boson particle, or “God particle,” thought to give all other particles their mass.

Now, scientists have detected a new, completely untheorized particle that challenges what physicists thought they knew about how quarks combine to form matter. They’re calling it Y(4140), reflecting its measured mass of 4140 Mega-electron volts.

“It must be trying to tell us something,” said Jacobo Konigsberg of the University of Florida, a spokesman for Fermilab’s collider detector team. “So far, we’re not sure what that is, but rest assured we’ll keep on listening.”

The Standard Model of elementary particles and forces includes six quarks, which bind together to form composite particles. Credit: Fermilab

Matter as we know it comprises building blocks called quarks. Quarks fit together in various well-established ways to build other particles: mesons, made of a quark-antiquark pair, and baryons, made of three quarks.

But recently, electron-positron colliders at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Japanese laboratory KEK have revealed examples of composite quark structures — named X and Y particles — that are not the usual mesons and baryons. And now, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration has found evidence for the Y(4140) particle.

The Y(4140) particle decays into a pair of other particles, the J/psi and the phi, suggesting to physicists that it might be a composition of charm and anticharm quarks. However, the characteristics of this decay do not fit the conventional expectations for such a make-up. Other possible interpretations beyond a simple quark-antiquark structure are hybrid particles that also contain gluons, or even four-quark combinations.

The Fermilab scientists observed Y(4140) particles in the decay of a much more commonly produced particle containing a bottom quark, called the B+ meson. Sifting through trillions of proton-antiproton collisions from Fermilab’s Tevatron, they identified a small sampling of B+ mesons that decayed in an unexpected pattern. Further analysis showed that the B+ mesons were decaying into Y(4140).

The Y(4140) particle is the newest member of a family of particles of similar unusual characteristics observed in the last several years by experimenters at Fermilab’s Tevatron as well as at KEK and the SLAC lab, which operates at Stanford through a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy.

“We congratulate CDF on the first evidence for a new unexpected Y state that decays to J/psi and phi,” said Japanese physicist Masanori Yamauchi, a KEK spokesperson. “This state may be related to the Y(3940) state discovered by Belle and might be another example of an exotic hadron containing charm quarks. We will try to confirm this state in our own Belle data.”

Theoretical physicists are trying to decode the true nature of these exotic combinations of quarks that fall outside our current understanding of mesons and baryons. Meanwhile, experimentalists happily continue to search for more such particles.

The Y(4140) observation is the subject of an article submitted by CDF to Physical Review Letters this week. Besides announcing Y(4140), the CDF experiment collaboration is presenting more than 40 new results at the Moriond Conference on Quantum Chromodynamics in Europe this week, including the discovery of electroweak top-quark production and a new limit on the Higgs boson, in concert with experimenters from Fermilab’s DZero collaboration.

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70 Replies to “New Particle Throws Monkeywrench in Particle Physics”

Cue the silly comments about the whole edifice of theoretical physics being about to collapse and that a bunch of know-nothings with easily debunked theories about the Electric Universe and non-existent gravity were right all along….

I’m sure they know what it is and have an answer soon, otherwise, the freaks from the anti-science group ‘the crazy scientist made a black hole that will swallow Earth’ will come out of the woodworks. Lol. Great things comes out of research of the sub-atomic particles.

This willingness to accept new evidence and build upon proven models in mainstream science is “utterly stupid”
We need a new paradigm because of the dogma and bias that doesn’t backup up by evidence of my world view.
I am a hedge fund manager, so you know you can trust my judgement.
If you look on youtube and various blogs, you will see that there is loads stuff that people go on about, even by guys from the IEEE (if you cant trust a guy who can wire a plug then who can you trust? )
Remember they said “insert favourite scientist” was mad/wrong/a witch

Electon volts? What’s that? Is that like electricity? Nah, it can’t be. Electricity doesn’t exist because dark energy and gravity are the only forces in astronomy and everyone on Earth has seen a graviton before so we know our 17th century hypothesis is correct. Who needs observation or the scientific method when we can simply worship Isaac Newton, Einstein, Lemaitre, and Hawking as infallible omniscient deities?

As Einstein said, “It is the theory that determines what can be observed” (1925).

Oills you tard.
General Relativity is about physics of the very large… like your mouth.

You might say Einstein tried to bring your mouth and brain together in his never ending task to find the theory of everything. Finding a binding law of physics which worked with the very small (i.e. your brain), and the very large (i.e. your mouth).

‘Quarks’ are quantified by charge state and voltage potential. Meaning that kinetic electro-magnetic forces are the foundation of all matter. We observe EM forces everywhere, but cosmologists mostly ignore them in space. No wonder they’re confused over most of the latest observations the past few years.

There was an article a few days ago about capturing and holding an ‘exciton’ with a ‘quantum donut’ in a tuned EM field. They discovered that finesse triumphed over brute force. Particle accelerators basically use brute force to more or less ‘smash rocks together’. The result is a random assortment (some predicted, many not) of out-of-sync, resonant energy states that near instantaneously condense back into a state of equilibrium. Perhaps if they used finesse, like the tuned EM ‘quantum donut’ experiment. they might provide an opportunity to more accurately quantify these ‘building blocks’.

@oillslippery
You should thank electrical engineers for designing most of the modern technology you use and enjoy everyday, including your ability to ridicule them on your computer over the internet.

Quote: “It must be trying to tell us something,” said Jacobo Konigsberg of the University of Florida, a spokesman for Fermilab’s collider detector team. “So far, we’re not sure what that is, but rest assured we’ll keep on listening.”

The particle is obviously screaming: “Heeeelp! Free me from the chains of the Standard Model! I am just a simple looping EM wave …”

Awesome – it’d be great if this was some sort of pointer towards what’s next – a clue to telling us how the Standard Model needs to be modified. The damn thing has had so much success. Too much success. I want inconsistencies. I want the cracks to appear because we know this isn’t the end of the story!

And bloody well Fermilab – I think they must be on their big push to get results published before LHC comes and dwarfs their energy aspirations.

“@oillslippery
You should thank electrical engineers for designing most of the modern technology you use and enjoy everyday, including your ability to ridicule them on your computer over the internet.”

crackpot, thanks for the link. If that’s correct, then my idea of studying these ‘particles’ with tuned EM fields is probably accurate, as opposed to just smashing them together.
That would also corroborate the derivative of Langmuir Law being applied to the ‘quantum’ realm, demonstrating plasma physics being scalar through the smallest to the largest structures.

gosh i cant believe OiM is still here… >.< someone has to implement an option in this blog to shun out comments if the reader prefers to. Otherwise, it’s such a pain to read this blog full of biased deluded commentators…

How does any scientists personal beliefs about *anything* somehow invalidate the science they do? Science is absolute, science done properly has no bias, it is simply a logical method applied for the search for knowledge.

If a person believes in, say, the occult for instance, in your mind OilIsMastery, how does this somehow discredit the science they do, as you imply with your many quotes? Im not talking about the person, but the science itself.

Alright… So a quick look at OilIsMastery’s posts shows that he’s not being ironic, unfortunately.

And just to address a few issues raised by the poster: electron-volt (eV) is a unit of energy and has nothing to do with forces of nature; I would suggest that you read a physics book to get your facts straight first. In addition, quote-mining scientists does not provide a representative view of the scientific community itself.

1 eV (electron-volt) = 1.6 x 10^-19 Joules or 4.45 x 10^-26 Kilowatt-hours. A very very small unit of energy useful in particle physics since particles have a very very small masses (compared to everyday life).

Fermilab’s collider will continue working as per normal once the LHC goes online. There’ll be two large cyclotrons, providing twice as many intriguing surprises, with the abilityt to “check up on each other”, to verify each other’s results, or not…. and that’s a valuable asset.

Fermilab made the LHC magnet which fused during the test run and threw the experiment off schedule. Where are all the conspiracy people screaming “sabotage”? 😉

the LHC is just amazing…i hope it will deliver us some other kind of new fuel….dark matter fuel or something. 500grams of dark matter would be enough for my whole life i guess that would be the real end of the fossil fuel age.

Are you trying to teach Oils actual basic science? You might as well try to teach a Wookie to sing opera. It’s a wasted effort. He’ll either start throwing quotes at you or ask trollish questions when he can’t answer your questions.

Doesn’t anyone realize the hubris and arrogance it takes to say that we really know anything about the very large or the very small (or even much of what’s in between)? The human race has been investigating this stuff intensively, with highly developed technology, for what – 50 years, tops? As the old saying goes, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine.”

Our technology is advancing exponentially. In another 50 years, who can even imagine what we’ll discover? Infinitesmally small somethings(?) that make up the particles that line up in strings to form the particles that cause the known particles to act like the currently theorized “quarks”. These will then be shown to be made of other even smaller things. What’s beyond the edge of the currently visible universe? And so much more…

My favorite statistic of all time is this – over 99.999% of all the scientists that have ever lived in the entire history of the human race…ARE STILL ALIVE.

Let that sink in for a few minutes.

I’ll make a prediction – what we find in the next couple generations will be far stranger than fiction, and we’ll be no closer to finding the ultimate answers than Aristotle was compared to Einstein. Each succeeding generation will not just modify the so-called “standard models” that are now accepted as the cat’s meow, but will turn them inside out and upside down, only to be overturned by the next generation.

Am I the only one who’s feeling a little dumb here? I don’t want to sound like a complete idiot but I thought that “matter” was made up of molecules…at least that’s what i was taught in school many years ago. Charm/anticharm quarks? Mesons? Baryons? Gluons? Can someone point me in the direction of something that might explain this stuff in relative layman’s terms without having to get a degree in particle physics? I’m not looking to study any of this specifically, but it would be nice to NOT feel like a complete dullard while reading this stuff!

“Doesn’t anyone realize the hubris and arrogance it takes to say that we really know anything about the very large or the very small (or even much of what’s in between)? The human race has been investigating this stuff intensively, with highly developed technology, for what – 50 years, tops? As the old saying goes, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine.”

I agree with geokstr.
When they go on like this (spendiing an inmense lot of money on equipment that wil produce and reveal any number of predicted or not predicted partikels; because between zero and a quark it is posible to create an infinitie number of partikels) no one will reveal the mistery of the existence of matter.
Shakespear was close but also far away from the solution to this when he stated , “To be or not to be is the question” In my opinion he should have said; “To be or not to be is the answer !!!” Think about this carefully because it contains more then at first sight.
best regards

Also, Geokstr, I sort of agree with your general point, but I strongly disagree with your assertion that we are no closer to describing nature today than we were two thousand years ago.

It’s not arrogant to think that our current theories and physical laws are accurate, since they all make accurate predictions and our working technology provides tangible proof of their veracity. You certainly wouldn’t say that the Ptolemaic model is just as accurate as our current understanding of the solar system.

We may never be able to truly understand the “absolute” structure of the universe, but we certainly have established a system (i.e. mathematics and physics) which describes nature accurately enough to make computers, satellites, cell phones, nuclear bombs, and space ships work properly and predictably.

99.999% of scientists are alive because there are so many in this present age that the many thousands that have lived and died, make up only 0.001% of the total amount.

Consider that this year alone, 1400 first year students enrolled in the science degree at my university. This is 1 university in australia, which would be concidered small compared to many institutions around the world.

Thanks for explaining the 99.999% further for me. On top of the percentages, remember that until just a few generations ago, about all the “technology” those scientists had to use was pretty much their five senses and their intellect. Now we take pictures of atoms and even rearrange single molecules to form words at the molecular level.

OilIsMastery:
What if we find out that there is a “god” who created this universe, but it turns out he’s just a dorky kid in a super-universe who did it accidentally in a science experiment. “He” might as well be, for all the interest he shows in this world.

According to the Babble, “He” used to show himself all the time thousands of years ago, when a tree was a mystery of creation to the ignorant savages who lived then. The sun disappears, and everyone falls down in terror of His power. But now that we know how to understand things like eclipses and locust plagues as something other than the wrath of God, “He” decides to take a hike and will no longer appear to us mere mortals. What a coincidence, eh?

A famous writer once said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” To people who lived long ago, being able to start a fire anytime you wanted would have been powerful “magic”, a miracle even.

“He” certainly gives no particular reasons to “worship” and “adore” him other than the chickenscratchings of some illiterate shepherds thousands of years ago that have been endlessly massaged, restructured, reinterpretted and re-written by committees of
the ruling religious elites down through the ages.

But it’s all the exact “Word of God” and meant to be taken word for word literally, right?

Peter: the “3-story house” figure is only the size of that particular detector. Fermi lab’s Tevatron uses a giant tunnel as well, since the particles are accelerated in the tunnel before being sent to the detector. Of course, the Tevatron’s tunnel is only 7km across. The radius of the tunnel limits the maximum energy of the beam, so the LHC will have quite an edge. Obviously Fermi’s accelerator isn’t obsolete yet, however.

A bad article by a would-be scientist. He gives 2 formulas for 2 different angles — and note that 2nd formula is derived from 1st and some simple geometry — and argues that this disproves general relativity.
What a tool!

Re: dark matter’s existence: I’m not an astrophysicist, but I’ve played with our radio telescope a bit, and I can inform you that it is relatively easy to reproduce the suggestive evidence that led to the proposal of dark matter. Put simply, if you examine the angular velocity of various stars at different distances from the galactic center (specifically, by looking for the doppler shift in known stellar emission lines), you can construct something called the galactic rotation curve, which is a plot of the angular velocity of the galaxy as a function of radius. If our understanding of gravity is correct, and the galaxy’s density distribution matches what we can see, you’d expect stars to rotate fastest at the center and slower towards the outside. However, this is not the case–the galactic rotation curve is basically flat.

Some people have proposed a model called MOND, for modified newtonian dynamics, which imposes a phenomenological corrective term on all forces at large distances; this really only means gravity, since the other forces are negligible at astronomical scales. You can get acceptable results using MOND, but it doesn’t sit well with many physicists, because we don’t have a very good reason to impose that corrective term.

Another explanation is to posit a different mass density for the galaxy–or the addition of “dark matter”. As it turns out, there are several candidates for what this dark matter is; for example, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or MAssive Compact Halo Objects are two current (and very interesting) research efforts. Neutrinos are also present in abundance throughout the universe, and can actually account for part–but not all–of the required dark matter mass. Some supersymmetric theories propose additional particles which could account for the remainder… people throw about terms like “neutralino”… but that’s about the edge of my understanding. 🙂

Anthony Peratt produced an accurate spiral galaxy rotation curve based on electromagnetic forces only.
That’s an explanation that does not require making stuff up.
Remember, ‘dark matter’ was conjured in order to provide enough galactic mass because the original prediction did not even come close to matching observations.
Recently, after more accurate velocity measurements, they determined that the Milky Way needs to be 50% more massive than previously thought. And even then it still takes mathematical acrobatics and fanciful names, akin to collateralized debt obligations 🙂 , to produce a flat rotation curve.

It comes down to faith in un-observed, theoretical mathematical constructs, or confidence in predictable, scalable applications of laboratory confirmed, empirical data.

The Y(4140) is an odd composite particle of quarks. This does not shake QCD and standard model in fundamental ways, but it does indicate there are hadronic systems which heretofore were unknown.

Dark matter is a moniker for sme source of gravity which accounts for the motion of stars in galaxies. Galaxies rotate much as a solid disk. Using Gauss’ law you can demonstrate this means that much of the source of gravitation is in halos and something which contains the galaxy. Further, this is not accounted from by an accounting of luminous matter, such as stars, nebula and local clusters.

This physics of galactic motion is gravitational, it is not electromagnetic. Further, by being “dark” this means what ever it is that makes up this mass does not absorb or emit photons. So EM appears not to play any role in the structure of this mass-energy.

The neutralino is a condensate of the supersymmetric pairs of the neutrino, photon and Higgs. It is a particle state that exist by physics similar to what happens with kaon oscillations.

I am not sure how it is that so many people have gotten these ideas about plasma & EM cosmology as some alternative to gravitation and relativity. Please folks, this stuff is nonsense.

@ Lawrence B.. Crowell, What a breath of fresh air compared to some of the numerous dubious postings. Thanks for giving a informed overview of this subatomic particle & where it may fit within the Standard Model. Unexpected discovery’s like this one stoke the flames of particle physicists everywhere. These results are telling us something important, and just maybe the Standard Model will have to be expanded or improved to make way for this new discovery. Double thanks for rebutting pseudoscience notions like PU/ EU/ EC originating from trolls with an agenda. Ever notice that they all provide links to the same web pages to back up their dubious claims. I’m afraid some novices may visit the homemade sights and come away with the idea that these spectacular assertions are in line with current astrophysical thinking. Hopefully most discerning reader will see these sites for what they are; PURE BUNK!

You mean they didn’t find icy tentacles streaching across space sending messages to everything at some sort of a action at a distance? Lame, figures they would just find some new quark. They haven’t found the higgs but they haven’t made a black hole yet either. I know this because if they did we would all be dead. But maybe we could find the higgs and study it for a micro secound before the force of gravity sucks in everything around it. I am still waiting for a proof of the speed of gravity and that random particle pairs are destined to always appear 100% percent of the time near micro scopic places before everything else does. Particle pair creations are measured in square meters and feet!